


Anasazi

by leiascully



Series: The FBI's Most Unwanted [53]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode Related, Gen, Government Conspiracy, Human Experimentation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-04
Updated: 2016-10-04
Packaged: 2018-08-19 11:18:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8204060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: Everything glowed at the edges and he couldn't sleep.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: 2.25 "Anasazi"  
> Disclaimer: _The X-Files_ and all related characters are the property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No profit is made from this work and no infringement is intended.

His brain was alight with the same dim nauseating flickering as the fluorescent bulbs in their office. He wasn't sleeping. He wasn't eating. Even Scully's fine-boned face looked blurred, her pale skin glowing with the luminosity of fog, not the clarity of candlelight. The weight of the cassette in his hand felt like the only real thing. He recognized its edges, its brittleness. He, too, was a vessel for forbidden knowledge. He too might be destroyed.

Scully saw right through him, the way she saw through everything. Scully was the kind of person who immediately recognized Navajo, so what chance did he have? Her questions prickled his skin like needles. Mulder itched, somewhere deep under his skin. Skinner rubbed him raw somehow with just the rasp of his voice, the sandpaper skepticism in his eyes. Mulder felt his fist forming like a counterweight at the end of his arm, felt it sail through the air as if it were beyond his control, as inevitable as a meteorite crashing to earth. Skinner caught it, wrestled him into submission as easily as a recalcitrant calf. Of course, Mulder thought bitterly. Of course. 

Everything glowed at the edges and he couldn't sleep. He shifted, some uneasy heat dampening the fine cotton of his shirts. He could not unravel the closely-woven code. Even Scully's contact could only tease out a few threads: the merchandise. Vaccination. They were recent words, and he wanted to peel back the layers, to find the most ancient words, the tales told around flickering firelight. He was certain there were deep roots to the conspiracy, twisted through centuries. If it would have helped, he would have unspooled the cassette and gazed through the almost-opaque ribbon inside, the way he'd stared through film strips as a child. Turning and turning in the widening gyre, he could not hear the music of the encryption. 

Someone shot at Scully. Someone shot his father. Mulder, mired in the submerged underworld of conspiracy, saw the blood spread, tinting everything red. Like Lady Macbeth, he washed and washed and never got clean. 

There was something in the water. He stumbled to Scully's, fell into the close holster of her arms, woke tangled alone and sweaty and mostly-undressed in the soft heap of her comforter. But Scully was gone and his gun was too, and he was betrayed by the last bastion of his truth. They would discharge his weapon into the water, to test the bullets. He remembered that much. 

Krycek was the ice that crackled sharp around the edges of his consciousness. Krycek had a gun, and then Mulder had the gun, and then Scully shot him and he was astonished. Krycek vanished, dissolving into the night, and Scully drugged him and told him she wasn't the first. 

He woke in the desert and everything seemed clear. Maybe it was the dry air. Maybe it was the ache in his shoulder. Pain had shaped him for so long. Albert spoke to him, and the world began to make sense again. There had been an omen. Of course there had been. All of this had been foretold, he felt. They were part of something larger. He and Scully were woven through this story, warp and weft. 

"I want you to find out, Mulder," Scully said as she left to salvage the remains of their careers, her voice and her eyes steady but the pulse flickering too fast in her throat. "I need you to."

He promised. 

The desert kept its secrets in a way the city never could. He would not have found the boxcar without Eric. He would not have found the merchandise, with their familiar scars. He called Scully, her voice thin and scratchy from filtering through the layers of earth and atmosphere between them. 

"There are bodies everywhere," he told her, trying to look at it the way she would, her scientific mind that put everything into the right place. The air was thick with dust and horror. He couldn't not think of other boxcars, other bodies, other science twisted into nightmare. "What have they done?"

And the sun went out, and he was alone in the dark.


End file.
